Google Chrome

Google Chrome a Killer Browser ?

In side by side comparisons, I found that Chrome tends to use about 80% less memory than Firefox in loading up the same pages and tabs.  There is also noticeably better long-term memory management as well. Before I recorded the screencast, I left Chrome open for about and hour and a half, and there was only about two extra megabytes of memory usage going on after I came back. After a few minutes of going back to using the apps I had loaded up, memory usage went back to normal.

• Chrome is based off Webkit, the same codebase as Safari.
• Chrome actually uses WebKit for rendering Web pages, the same rendering engine as Safari, which is known to be very fast. Put that in a simple, well optimized, stripped down shell and you get the fastest Web browser around. It loads fast, it displays pages fast, and we’re talking noticeable differences here, which really makes it a joy to use.
• When you’re entering a saturated market with a new product, you can’t change everything. You must carefully balance the features you want to blatantly copy with the ones you want to innovate in. I was pleased to see that Google Chrome was built with this in mind; for example, it’s easy to switch from Firefox, but it does bring enough novelties to make you stick around. Importing your bookmarks from Firefox is easy and works well; and other details, like keyboard shortcuts, are the same. Therefore, Chrome’s learning curve is virtually non-existent; start it up and you’ll be browsing as usual in no time.
• Click the control icon in the upper right corner of the browser and you’ll get the option to open a new tab, a new window, or a new incognito window. Incognito window will fire up without appearing in browser or search history, and it won’t leave cookies or any other traces of your activity, except files you’ve downloaded or bookmarks. Yes, Safari has it, too, but it’s a nice jab at Firefox which skipped some similar privacy features in version 3.0.

So what do we here at Facebookks.com think of Chrome? It's fast, very fast. It loaded Amazon.com's front page, which has a fair amount of Flash, in less than 2 seconds.

Internet Explorer 7 took about 5 seconds, Mozilla Firefox 3 about 4 seconds for the same page. (Due to company security restrictions, we haven't been allowed to install IE 8.)

As with Google's own home page, the Chrome interface is remarkably clean and spare. It takes Internet Explorer 7's minimalist toolbar to an extreme, placing the tabs right at the top and displaying only three icons at the top left — back, forward and refresh.

The address bar doubles as a search field. Google is the default search engine, of course, but you can switch to another easily.

On the address bar's left end is an "add bookmarks" icon; to its right are two drop-down-menu icons featuring most of the commonly used functions that IE spreads over six menus and Firefox, eight.

When you first launch Chrome, or open a blank window or tab, you're greeted with thumbnails of your most recently viewed Web pages, a nice touch that Google "borrowed" from the innovative but little-used Norwegian browser Opera. You can click on each to go directly to that page.

Like IE 8, Chrome also incorporates a stealth browsing mode which saves none of the user's browsing history, cached images or pages visited — "porn mode" as witty bloggers instantly dubbed it when Microsoft introduced it as "InPrivate."

Google chooses to call that feature "Incognito." You'll know you're there when you spot the little icon of a guy wearing a fedora, sunglasses and a trench coat; it's up to you to decide if he's a spy or just a flasher.

The real differences separating Chrome from IE and Firefox are less obvious. As the lengthy comic detailing Chrome's technical aspects explains, the browser treats each tab or window as a separate application, and indeed, Windows XP's Task Manager reveals that they're all handled as separate processes.

Google did that to minimize JavaScript and Flash issues, which can normally take down an entire browser when one tab gets hung up. This way, the other tabs and windows stay alive.

But it also allows for some pretty cool flexibility. Not only can the order of tabs in the browser window be shifted around as in IE 7 (Firefox 2 couldn't do that, while the two-month-old Firefox 3 can), but each tab can be dragged out of the frame to become its own window.

And in the "page" drop-down menu, there's an option to "Create application shortcuts." Use that to save a Web link right to your desktop, and then open it without any address bar or tools at all — about as minimalist as it gets.

The Google engineers also improved the JavaScript engine they borrowed from Apple's Safari. This makes Chrome really shine on complex pages that depend on Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), such as Google's own Gmail or the revamped Yahoo! Mail.

User changes to such pages occur instantly — not almost instantly as they do in other browsers. That doesn't sound like much of a difference, but the cumulative effect is striking.

So what could be better about Chrome? Well, as most of the reviewers pointed out, there's no way to organize your bookmarks yet, and several noticed that NBC's Web site crashed the entire browser (not just the one tab) when they tried to watch Olympics video footage.

CNet's Ina Fried also noticed some creepy language in the end-user license agreement that must be agreed to before installing Chrome.

Not only does Google reserve the right to update Chrome on your machine without your consent — arguably necessary in an era of "zero-day" hacker exploits — but it also implies that, as with Gmail, it might display ads tailored to your content right in the browser itself.

More startling is this: "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services."

In other words, Google claims the right to use anything you create using its Web-based applications, such as the Google Docs office suite, the Picasa photo organizer or the Blogger blog creator to promote its own services, without permission or compensation.

That blanket intellectual-property-rights grab may not hold up in court, but it's certainly discomfiting. If we were Google's legal team, we'd tone it down by several orders of magnitude.

Overall, however, Chrome really is a very solid piece of work for a "0.2" release (only final editions get full integers, by long-standing geek tradition).

It's also fitting that just as we were finishing up this review, Internet Explorer 7 crashed yet again, while Chrome kept chugging along.

Google, though, has much bigger ambitions. The goal, say Google execs, is not merely to win share of an existing market, but to change the very nature of Internet browsing -- and the way we use computers. If Chrome works as planned, it will lead much of computing from the desktop -- Microsoft's domain -- toward remote data centers. These, in Google's lingo, are known as the "cloud." Google runs the biggest and most efficient data centers on earth, and moving much of the world's computing from desktops into its clouds is the heart of the company's strategy. "Google really believes the future of the Web is running applications on the Web," says Danny Sullivan, who runs Calafia Consulting, a Web consulting firm. "They want to be leading the charge."

As this battle commences, Microsoft enjoys a towering head start. Its Internet Explorer dominates the browser market, with 75% share. And Microsoft is launching its latest upgrade, IE8, which is loaded with new features. Google's Chrome, by contrast, appears bare-bones. Its power, say Google engineers, will come from its ability to run applications faster and more securely, especially those hosted outside the PC, on the cloud. Unlike Google's top-secret search algorithms or the proprietary software it uses to carry out its searches, Chrome was born as an open-source system.